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CHESTER ARTHUR TOUR OF OLD NEW YORK

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September 18, 1981, Page 00024Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

There are two New York City buildings where Presidents of the United States took their oath of office. One is Federal Hall on Wall Street, with a handsome columned portico and a statue of George Washington on the front. The other is 123 Lexington Avenue, which now houses the Kalustyan Orient Expert Trading Corporation and the pungent odors from its bins of spice.

Everyone knows that the nation's first President was sworn in where his statue now stands. But it is far from common knowledge that in the Lexington Avenue building, then one of a row of brownstone residences, Vice President Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as President early on the morning of Sept. 20, 1881. That house will be the starting point at 2 P.M. on Sunday of a free hourlong walking tour of Chester A. Arthur's New York.

''He was upstairs there when he got the word,'' said Felix J. Cuervo, gesturing at the weathered front of the building, a few doors north of East 28th Street. Inside the first-floor store, a clerk busily poured something odiferous into a tin. ''He had to come down here - it was the parlor then - to be sworn in,'' Mr. Cuervo said.

Mr. Cuervo, a field representative of the State Employment Service, is, on his own time, the president of the Native New Yorker's Historical Association, and it is in this role that he has set up a centennial ceremony for Sunday in front of the Arthur house. He will then set off as guide of the tour. Theme Is Civil Service Reform

Mr. Cuervo took a preliminary walk the other day on his lunch hour and, to a companion who is interested in New York City history but too lazy to work at studying it, the stroll was a delight. He has a theme - followed loosely but with enough examples to justify the claim - of Civil Service reform. President Arthur, he noted, signed the Civil Service Act of 1883, which was designed to end what Mr. Cuervo called ''the infamous spoils system'' and the neighborhood appears to have been swarming with Civil Service reformers. But Mr. Cuervo also has an immense store of miscellaneous lore and, during the tour, he is likely to seize upon innumerable targets of anecdotal opportunity. But all that comes along the way. It starts like this:

At 2, a crowd gathers in front of the Arthur home, and the Pledge of Allegiance is led by Mr. Cuervo's son Robert, a political science professor at St. John's University in Staten Island and the historical researcher for the tour. Then Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of Queens, a member of the Post Offic e and Civil Service Committee, will unveil a plaque noting that P resident Arthur was sworn in there and that in 1907 William Rando lph Hearst, the publisher, owned the house.

The Cuervos, father and son, have researched what it must have been like on Lexington Avenue on the historic night 100 years ago. When word spread that President James A. Garfield, shot by a disgruntled office seeker, had died, reporters converged. Would Mr. Arthur have a statement? ''I daren't ask him,'' the doorkeeper told them. ''He is sitting alone in his room, crying like a child, with his head on the desk and his face buried in his hands.'' At 2:15 A.M., Justice John R. Brady of the State Supreme Court administered the oath and Mr. Arthur became the 2 1st President.

''The plaque will go up there,'' said Felix Cuervo, pointing above the food store's sign, ''not there,'' pointing to a wound in the bricks next to the stairway. Vandals had ripped off two plaques in the past, he said. This one, he hopes, will be out of their reach. A Stop at the Armory

Then he headed south along Lexington Avenue to the armory at 26th Street that was, according to a plaque on the brick front, the site of the famous 1913 show of Impressionist paintings and that everyone knows as the home of the famed ''Fighting 69th''

Mr. Cuervo pressed on with the Civil Service theme: ''An Irish regiment. Many of those veterans became policemen and mailmen, Civil servants.''

The tour travels west on 26th to the New York Life Insurance Building at Madison Avenue. On the direct historical point, Mr. Cuervo said, ''They insured the lives of both Garfield and Arthur.'' Then he launched into the first of his anecdotal excursions: ''This was the scene of the old Madison Square Garden, where Harry Thaw shot the architect Stanford White. They say that sometime later Thaw was shown City Hall in Philadelphia, which he found to be a remarkably ugly building. He asked who designed it - and then said, 'I guess I shot the wrong architect'.''

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Next, to the northeastern corner of Madison Square Park. There - portly, somber, impressive, with an air of dignity and a patina of green - stands the 1899 statue of President Arthur by George Bissell. At the park's southeastern edge is a statue of Roscoe Conkling. Mr. Cuervo noted how Representative Conkling fought to keep Arthur from losing the patronage post of Collector of the Port of New York. ''Conkling collapsed right here, right where the statue is now, during the Blizzard of '88, and eventually died.''

West along the 23d Street edge of the park: The fund-raisers for the statue of Secretary of State William H. Seward at the Broadway corner ran out of money, Mr. Cuervo said. ''So they bought the body of a Lincoln statue and attached Seward's head to it. He was a very little man. See how big this body is?'' Girl Watching on 23d Street

Now an anecdotal storm: ''West along 23d is the old Stern's store. Stayed open in the '88 blizzard and sold just one spool of thread. No. 14 there was the birthplace of Edith Wharton.'' Pointing to the Flatiron Building -which is on the triangle of Fifth Avenue, Broadway and 22d Street and was the end of the horsecar line, he said, ''Men would come to watch the wind whirling around the building lift the women's skirts. The police would chase them from 23d Street. 'Skidoo!', they'd say. Twenty-three skidoo!''

Moving south along Broadway and east on 20th Street to the tidy four-story brownstone where Theodore Roosevelt was born, Mr. Cuervo described him as ''an early Civil Service reform advocate and one of the first Civil Service commissioners.'' Across the street was an unexpected plaque, above a woolens and worsted store, stating: ''On this site Sir Arthur Sullivan composed 'The Pirates of Penzance' during 1879.''

Next a glimpse eastward to an apartment house at the southeast corner of Park and 20th. ''That was the site of All Soul's Unitarian Church, where Dr. Henry Bellows used to give sermons in favor of Civil Service reform,'' Mr. Cuervo said.

Back west, then north along Fifth Avenue to 23d Street. The northwest corner, now a bank branch, was the site of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the first, said a plaque, with a passenger elevator. It was also the site, Mr. Cuervo added, of stirring calls for Civil Service reform by Carl Schurz; and of what politicians who lived by the spoils system knew as Boss Platt's ''Amen Corner.'' There, Mr. Cuervo said, Thomas Collier Platt, the Republican state leader, would listen to appeals for patronage jobs. If he approved, he would say, ''Amen.'' No nonsense about Civil Service tests. Cleveland the Campaigner

At 27th Street the Victoria Building takes the name of its predecessor, the Victoria Hotel, a Presidential campaign headquarters for Grover Cleveland. ''A strong advocate of Civil Service,'' said Mr. Cuervo. And a t the southe ast corner of 29th Street lived Dorman Bridgman Eaton, who draft ed the bill that became the Pendleton Act of 1883, the basis of the F ederal Civil Service. After signing it, President Arthur made Eaton head of the Civil Service Commission.

Next a quick trip back west along 28th Street to Broadway: ''This,'' said Mr. Cuervo, ''was 'Tin Pan Alley'. A plaque just east of Broadway confirmed it. Then north on Broadway. ''In the Hotel Breslin here at 29th,'' he said, ''a honeymoon couple was in the lobby one day in 1905. The woman complained that the rain was keeping them from sightseeing. 'Wait 'til the sun shines, Nellie,' her husband said. A songwriter was there and -'' Reall y? Mr. Cuervo nodded firmly . ''Really.''

On West 32d Street, at No. 40, is the Greeley Square Post Office. ''That's where Carl Schurz's house used to be,'' said Mr. Cuervo. ''Funny. He fought for Civil Service and they tore down his house to put up a post office. I wonder if the guys sorting mail in there know that he was their great champion. I'll bet they don't.''

A version of this article appears in print on September 18, 1981, on Page C00024 of the National edition with the headline: CHESTER ARTHUR TOUR OF OLD NEW YORK. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe